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Today our server was having problems letting people on, so in his infinite wisdom the sysadmin had the server rebooted, of course Oracle, Applications, and the rest of the bunch were all up and running at the time.

After I found out and the machine was up, I tried to start the demo database that was just installed (8.1.6). Svrmgrl, connect internal, startup. I figured if anything happened in the reboot it would let me know after trying to start it up. I get a "not connected to oracle" error. I try to log in, it says a startup/shutdown is in progress. I try to shut it down, and it gives me a "not connected to oracle" no matter what I do.

I'm assuming there isn't much I can do other than Open a TAR and hope I can get it open, or re-install (it's the vision demo database installed with applications). I don't have a backup yet because I just installed it yesterday, and didn't have the disk space to temporarily store the files I needed, or have the sysadmin available to dump it to tape.

It's not a huge loss, it's just the canned demo database anyway, just a pain how things tend to work out.

Before you open the server manager check your environment variables whether they had been set correctly.

ORACLE_HOME
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PATH
CLASSPATH
ORACLE_SID=sid

To me it looks like that you have not set your demo_db's sid on the ORACLE_SID env variable. as a result, when you get to open the server manager and ask it to connect internal, it does not know of where to connect.

Also make sure that the database name is set on the tnsnames.ora and the listeners are there to listen.

Pat,
AFAIK, If you want, you can play with sql.bsq little bit but, definitely not with lkXXXX file. You can't bring your database up without that file. I do not have some insight information on it. I appreciate, if someone could throw light on it.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by pwoneill [/i]
[B]Jeff: What was the significance of removing lkDEMO?
[/B][/QUOTE]
I'm not exactly sure what it does, but it has something to do with saving the state your last startup/shutdown. If your database is down and you remove the file it will be re-created upon startup. I had a problem similar to yours and when I called Oracle Support, they told me to delete this file.

Actually, if you take a look at the file it contains "DO NOT DELETE THIS FILE!". Just when you think you have a firm grasp on Oracle...